Poll Decoder: What the Hell Do the Tea-Partiers Really Want?

Over at 538.com, Nate Silver ably sums up what little news there is in the three relatively recent polls about the "Tea Party" "movement." Gallup’s poll—out today—has gotten a little bit of buzz by demonstrating that the movement largely demographically mirrors the nation as a whole. Silver parses the Gallup poll along with a Winston Group poll and one from CBS to see what we can learn about the group itself. To wit:

It is conservative.

It is anti-establishment.

It has a somewhat amorphous and nonspecific goals.

It’s point number three that ought to cause the most alarm among conservatives and give liberals and independents reason to believe that the midterms will not be decided by a legion of wolf-slaughtering secessionists. The Winston Group survey goes into the most detail on this point, showing, for instance, that Tea Party supporters consider "Economy/Jobs" to be far more important than "Spending" (36 to 21 percent), and that when given a choice between just those two national priorities, Tea Partiers exactly mirror the nation as a whole in preferring, by about two to one, the goal of "Reducing unemployment to 5%" to "Balancing the budget."

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Winston poll of Tea Party supporters, however, is the sampling of opinions on what is largely objective fact, and how some fundamental streak of practicality consistently undermines what is undoubtedly some strongly held ideological beliefs. For example, asked which policy would create more jobs, "Tax cuts for small businesses" or "Increased government spending on infrastructure like roads and bridges," Tea Party supporters give the answer you’d expect from an audience of whom 47% get their news from Fox News (another problem entirely): Eighty-five percent say tax cuts would create more jobs than spending (nine percent).

However, this is a question with an at least partially observable true answer and even people who watch Fox News do get out in the world. When asked if certain policies will create jobs, 61% of the Tea Party supporters agree that "Increased government spending on infrastructure" would accomplish that.

I wish there were more surveys looking at the specifics of both what the Tea Party movement wants and how it believes those things can be accomplished. I don’t doubt that the rallies reflect a genuine discomfort with both the economy and the political environment. But I suspect a lot of the anger and more wrong-headed ideas come from fear, stoked by disinformation, rather than strong ideas about policy. Take, for example, the near-certainty among respondents (82 percent) that "when tax provisions expire next year, tas on people like me will increase."

Tea Partiers are, then, extraordinarily more content or egalitarian or something than most Americans, since in order to face tax increases in 2011, one actually needs to make more than $250,000 a year. But if Tea Party supporters—an overwhelming majority of whom make less than $75,000—consider themselves "like" that top two percent of wage-earners? That’s a very, well, Christian outlook. Or maybe they just mean "white."